Things worth knowing

Tuesday, 18 April 2017

I went to London last week and walked past this coffee shop, which I had heard of because it pops up on google maps. It's called Fuckoffee. (Incidentally, I've cropped out a woman wearing the same yellow leather jacket that I've got - she can fuckoffee an' all.)

The name is obviously intended to capture attention by incorporating a swearword. It works - I haven't heard of any other random coffee shops in London. But it's also a clever pun that only works if you have the exact non-standard thing that I'm researching right now: a missing preposition!

If you have the standard version of what I'm talking about, you'd say

Let's go to Costa

or

Let's go to Fuckoffee

when you were suggesting coffee places to go to. But if you have this non-standard form, which is found in London and in various other UK places, it means you can miss out the preposition to when you're talking about certain locations or institutions, such as a familiar coffee shop. So you might say

Let's go Costa

or

Let's go Fuckoffee

which, for most people with a native London dialect, will sound exactly like Let's go for coffee.

Monday, 3 April 2017

I went to the Ramsgate tunnels this weekend. It was interesting! Our tour guide was really, really enthusiastic. He talked quite fast, so sometimes I think he was making speech errors, but there were a couple of things that he said that I think were not errors but rather just interesting quirks. He had a couple of common mispronunciations like 'particliar', and sometimes he used the wrong word. But there were two things that I really liked.

One was that he pronounced gas mask as gas marks. This is called metathesis - he swapped round the /k/ and /s/ sounds, just like when people say aks instead of ask.

The other was weirder - he was talking about rationing, and he said that a family got just a very sliver of butter and a very sliver of meat. You can't use very that way! It can only modify adjectives and adverbs, not nouns! But it was clear he didn't just miss out small or something - he said it twice, there was no pause or anything. So... yeah. Unclear. It's a reasonably uncommon word, so that might be relevant. You can occasionally use very with a noun, like the very essence of the thing, but that's a slightly different thing... I really don't have any wisdom to offer here but I just wanted to point it out.